“Robert Hichens [who wrote the original novel] also wrote ‘The Garden of Allah,’ ‘Bella Donna,’ and many other novels; he was famous in the early part of this century… Let’s go over some of the apparent flaws of that picture.” —Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock/Truffaut, 1966)

This quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary interview with François Truffaut reveals an underlying dissatisfaction with The Paradine Case that probably has as much to do with the painful experience that he had making the film for David O. Selznick than with any perceived deficiencies in the finished film. The project was an assignment that Hitchcock chose out of a…